Political divides between graduates educated in different fields of education

Education has been identified as the one key variable that impacts attitudes and political behavior in advanced knowledge societies. In line with Hooghe and Marks (2022), my study proposes that in order to understand educational divides, attention should be paid to the field of study in which people are educated. Van de Werfhorst and Kraaykamp (2001) proposed that fields of study supply four types of resources to students: cultural, economic, communicative, and technical (CECT for short). Studies in comparative politics and political sociology have shown that these different field-related educational resources manifest in diverging attitudes on socio-cultural issues (Van de Werfhorst and de Graaf 2004) or on attitudes on the new ‘transnational cleavage’ (Hooghe and Marks 2022). However, studies in political economy have also documented divides between the highly educated with regards to policy preferences and voting behavior (see e.g. Ansell and Gingrich 2021). To study how divides within the group of the higher educated are linked to different identities and attitudes on the universalism-particularism cleavage, and to study what extent social closure between graduates with different educational resources enforces these divides, I will draw on a variety of data sources. First, I will use longitudinal lab data from the Graduate Survey from Switzerland from the years 2002-2018 carried out by the Swiss Federal Statistical Office. The Graduate Survey is a full population survey sent out to all graduates of Swiss universities and institutes of technology, universities of applied science and universities of teacher education in every even year. The Graduate Survey includes detailed questions on the respondents’ educational past, notably branch of education and the (self-reported) skills and competences acquired, but also on their current employment and sociodemographic and parental background. Using that data, I will develop a new measure of field-related educational resources, tailored specifically to the higher educated population. Second, I will link the newly developed measure to original survey data from Switzerland for the year 2020 to study identity formation and attitudinal divides with focus on graduates educated in different fields of education. Finally, by linking the Graduate Survey data to structural household data, my study measures social closure along the lines of educational fields within the highly educated population in terms of household composition and location. My analysis thus adds to the field theory of education and generates insights into the implications of educational expansion on contemporary political divides.